Storage devices, such as hard disk drives and solid state drives, provide storage media for host processing systems to store and read various data objects. These data objects may include images, videos, word documents, spreadsheets, and various other file types capable of being processed by the host processing system. To make storage media available to the host system, one or more of the storage devices may be communicatively coupled to the system using a Small Computer System Interface (SCSI) bus, a Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) bus, a Serial ATA (SATA) bus, a Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) bus, Fibre Channel, or some other similar interface or bus.
In some examples, hard disk drives may include a combination of perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) zones and shingled magnetic recording (SMR) zones. PMR zones read and write data to individual tracks that are separated from one another to prevent data from being overwritten. In contrast, SMR works by writing a set of tracks closely together in parallel on the hard disk, similar to roof shingles, allowing data from one track to partially overwrite data on another track. Accordingly, data that is written to the SMR portion of the disk drive must be prevented from entirely overwriting data previously stored in the storage media.
In addition to the user data stored on a storage device, file system metadata might also be stored that includes the file or directory name, the length of the contents of a file, and the location of the file in the folder hierarchy, among other possible file or directory metadata. However, as hard disk densities increase and SMR drives increase in popularity, the storage of metadata for the SMR zones can be challenging.